Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (6 page)

She had been hired as the
Post
’s foreign desk administrator, meaning she ran the paper’s foreign bureaus, handling the needs of the foreign correspondents, overseeing the department’s budget and generally making tough things happen. For instance, having the savvy and know-how to get cash to the paper’s fixer in Pakistan so the
Post
’s reporter could do his job.

I spotted Rebekah right away in the newsroom—who wouldn’t?—and made it a point to meet her. Over the next few weeks we went out several times. At work we sat at our desks in different parts of the
Post
newsroom tapping out funny and flirtatious messages back and forth, getting to know each other.

Then, one night at a restaurant, she dropped it on me: the Friend Talk.

I’d both given and received the Friend Talk before. At forty-four, there was something especially humiliating about getting it. Come to think of it, there was something especially humiliating about “dating” at forty-four. Maybe that was the larger issue.

At any rate, I wasn’t having it. One benefit of being middle-aged was that you no longer have time for wasting time. I knew what I wanted, and it was not to be Rebekah’s friend.

“Well, I’m disappointed,” I said, “but I’m not going to be your friend.”

Silence.

“I don’t mean I’m going to be your enemy, or that I hate you,” I explained. “What I mean is that I’m not going to continue to hang out with you and message you at work. You’re beautiful,
I think you’re terrific, and I want to date you. And if you don’t want that, that’s fine. But I can’t pretend I’ll be happy just being your friend. It’ll make me miserable a thousand ways.”

As a younger man, I had moped for months after women who were not romantically interested in me but liked me well enough to spend time with me. I hoped if I hung around long enough and was charming enough, eventually I’d win them over. Usually these efforts ended when they got boyfriends and wanted us all to hang out.

“Oh,” she said.

I tend to explain relationships in terms of the solar system. Call it a quirk.

If a person is the sun, I told Rebekah, when you’re young, you have “friends” all the way out to Pluto. Roommate friends, first-job friends, bar friends. You’re certain they’ll be in your life forever, orbiting as sure and steady as the planets. In truth, they’re held to you by weak gravity. As you get older, they break free and spin off. You don’t have the time or effort to try to keep them. The friends you keep are in the tight orbits, close to the sun; think of them like Mercury and Venus, where the gravity is strong. You may have a couple in Earth orbit. Once you hit Mars, you’re outside the orbit of grown-up friends.

Rebekah pretended to understand my strained metaphor, but mostly she respected it. I was deeply disappointed. But I knew it was better to absorb the short, sharp shock of pain now than drag it out for months.

The next day at the
Post
, we didn’t message each other.

A couple of days after that, we chanced upon each other in the hallway. We chatted amiably about nothing for a few minutes and then started to walk in opposite directions.

She called back over her shoulder, “I miss my messages.”

“Well,” I responded, walking off, “that’s life on Mars.”

A few days later I got a text on my phone. It was from Rebekah. It read: “What if I’m tired of life on Mars?”

I wish I could claim that the entire solar-system-to-life-on-Mars-line was a grand, elegant, and elaborate gambit to win Rebekah. In my telling of the story, it usually is. But it was not. It was an immediate and brutally honest bit of emotional self-preservation in response to getting dumped.

And yet, it had led to this point where Rebekah wanted to come back.

There was the proof, in digital type on the screen of the phone in my hand. An open invitation to the thing I wanted most.

Naturally, I waited several hours before I replied.

But reply I did. I remember being outrageously happy when tapping out that text.

And so we began dating. The first thing you notice about Rebekah is that she’s beautiful. Soon after, you discover she has a great wit and sound comedic timing. Must have come from her theater work in college. She gives off a Jennifer Aniston–esque vibe. Even more remarkable is her resilience in not only adapting to but excelling in tough circumstances. A preacher’s family is not a rich one and you seek bargains everywhere. For a time Rebekah’s family car was a cheaply acquired 1970s station wagon whose previous job was serving as a hearse. It sounds Gothic to you and me, but she happily recalls sleeping with her two siblings in the vehicle’s casket-length rear on long road trips—sans any sort of restraining devices, of course. As a young woman, Rebekah worked her way through college, three jobs at a time. She worked retail and at a law firm during the day and did her homework while running a country club front desk at nights, fending off the boozy male club members slouching on her counter, trying to impress her. She had the drive to win a scholarship to study in Beirut and the chops to get into a graduate program in Paris.

Of the many things I admire about Rebekah is her directness in knowing what she wants. I tend to be a muller, fully examining a situation, turning it over and over, trying to get my head completely around it before I take action. Rebekah says during this time I’m in my “shell.” Ultimately, I pop out and we move forward. Maybe not as fast as she’d like, but eventually.

Rebekah gets a quicker read on situations than I do and knows what she wants. Sometimes this produces friction in our union: Rebekah wonders why I won’t move forward. I worry that we’re not as expert on a situation as we think we are.

After a couple months of dating, over dinner, Rebekah told me she wanted to be married and have a family. As we moved forward, she said, if I felt that was not the future I wanted, I needed to let her know so she could move on.

Rebekah clearly did not want to be married to anybody just to be married; she’d had that chance before and skipped it. She didn’t know if I was the right guy, but she let me know—rightfully—that I owed her the decency of telling her if I didn’t want the same thing she did.

I felt like a relationship cop had just read my Miranda rights.

It was the best thing that could have happened to me. If Rebekah hadn’t put her foot down, I would most likely have done as I’d done before: hit a cruising altitude in the relationship where I was fine dating exclusively and long-term without any particular goal in mind. Rebekah would’ve rightly got sick of the inaction and we’d have just . . . drifted apart, what I’d allowed to happen so many times before.

I saw the wisdom of Rebekah’s argument and realized nothing truly worth having in life comes easily or without some kind of leap. Aside from being attracted to each other, enjoying spending time together, and being in love, we shared the most fundamental of connections: our faith. We are both Christians and knew this
meant we would be in accord—or at least start from the same point—on the most crucial of topics that either make or break marriages, from worldview to money to raising children. Every Christian has a testimony and mine is this: I received Christ my freshman year of college, read the Bible assiduously, attended church, and tried to live right. But within a couple years my innate selfishness, lack of discipline, and human desire overtook my faith and I fell away from it for more than two decades. I dated a number of women. I cared deeply for many but treated others poorly, and for that I will always be sorry. I was mired in narcissism, pursuing my own empty compulsions and separated from God. It was Rebekah who brought me back to church and to God. It is the most important of the many ways she has saved me. I am still narcissistic and selfish. The difference now is that I care that I am, I seek forgiveness for these and my manifold other sins, and I pray for the strength to change. Faith in a fallen world is a constant struggle, sustained only by the grace of God.

So even though Rebekah and I felt bonded on the big issues that would hold us together, a more prosaic one threatened to stuff the union before it could take off: Where would we live?

Rebekah took the job at the
Post
so she could be in Washington while applying to the U.S. Foreign Service. The Foreign Service was actually the safety school of Rebekah’s career options. Her career of choice was spy. She had applied to—and actually been offered a directorate of operations job with—the CIA. Then the Agency began the security clearance process. She took multiple polygraphs in unmarked and otherwise nondescript Northern Virginia buildings. The Agency interviewed Rebekah’s family and friends all over the country. She learned of these interviews only when she got puzzled calls from friends saying, “Hey, this is going to sound crazy, but this CIA guy came to my house . . .” And she waited. And waited. To survive, she took various jobs,
such as the one at the
Post
. Cannily, on a parallel track, she started the application process to the Foreign Service, a job that would still mean a career overseas but one with less intrigue. Finally, after nearly three years waiting on the Agency, she lost patience and decided to pursue the Foreign Service. It is a decision for which I am ever thankful. Dinner conversations would have gone like this:

“How was your day, honey?”

Silence.

By the time Rebekah and I met, she had already passed two of the Foreign Service’s three rigorous entrance exams. If she passed the brutal oral exam and got a security clearance, she told me clearly she would accept a job, which most likely would lead to a posting abroad. That was what she wanted.

I, on the other hand, had never lived overseas and frankly had no desire to do so. Where I was in life, I was as comfortable as a worn recliner. I liked my America and my conveniences. I liked being able to easily drive to a football game at my alma mater and get a satisfyingly large diet soda beverage—with ice—nearly every mile along the way, happily ensconced in my satellite radio-equipped, fairly taxed, cheap-gas-drinking car. And I knew that if I moved to many places overseas, I’d miss the little things about America. You know: the freedom of expression, assembly, and religion; the rule of law, free and fair elections, and the comforting knowledge that we’d already had our civil war. Those sorts of things. But I could see where my newspaper industry was going. And, having neither siblings nor living parents, nothing tethered me to any one place. I wanted to see where this woman, and this life, would take me.

In mid–2009, Rebekah was accepted into the U.S. Foreign Service, which I had come to realize was an impressive accomplishment. New officers get what’s called a bid list that shows
which jobs will be available when their posting is set to begin. Each officer must rank every job in order of preference and can ask to be sent to a particular one. But in the end it’s called a service for a reason, and you go where your country sends you.

Rebekah got the bid list for her first posting in November, right around my birthday. We joked, sort of, that it was the worst birthday present I’d ever received. There were about one hundred jobs on the list in about seventy-five cities all over the world. I’d never heard of half the cities. Most of those I had heard of were usually in the news for the wrong reasons. Where was the Paris and Rome of the glamorous Foreign Service? Instead we saw Port Moresby and Malabo. This was the first of several ways we became disabused of the Foreign Service’s grandeur.

Rebekah and I agreed that the best posting would be Seoul. We knew it was first-world modern and had heard that it was clean and amazingly safe, the simmering threat from the North notwithstanding. Rebekah had lived and worked in East Asia and was intimate with Confucian culture. We liked the potential for regional travel. And because of its size and status, home to global companies, Seoul offered the possibility that I could continue something approximating my career—communications of some sort at a high level. Rebekah would bid on Seoul, but going there was not up to us. It was the State Department’s decision.

A month after getting the bid list, in December 2009, Rebekah and I joined her classmates for “flag day,” a Foreign Service tradition where each member of the entire incoming class gets their first posting, in front of everyone, friends and family included. It is a dramatic and anxious event, with each posting called out along with the name of the officer being sent there. The officer comes to the front of the room and receives a small flag of their assigned country. There are tears of joy, relief, and unhappiness. You see newly minted officers exulting in their posting,
imagining it as the first step toward an eventual ambassadorship. You see others wanly taking the flag of their assigned country, suddenly sure that joining the Foreign Service was the worst decision of their lives. We were prepared for anything: Rebekah was bidding for one of only two jobs available in Seoul.

State Department officials started reading down the list and, just a few names in, the first Seoul job went to one of Rebekah’s classmates. Rebekah and I were not allowed to sit together, so we exchanged nervous looks across the big room. More names and more cities were read off. I kept crossing names off the list of jobs I held. One Seoul posting remained, but so were jobs in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea; Sana’a, Yemen; and Accra, Ghana. “Well,” I thought, “in for a dime, in for a dollar.” I’d never lived in a place where I’d be assigned an armed escort every time I left my house and was not allowed to travel at night, but, hey, life’s an adventure, right?
Right?

The list was now down to the last twenty or so postings. That left one Seoul and nineteen not-Seouls.

Then, suddenly, magically, prayerfully, we heard: “Seoul, Republic of Korea: Rebekah Davis.”

Up until right before that moment, I’m not certain I had fully realized that, for the first time, I was putting my life and immediate destiny in the hands of someone besides me. I liked choosing where I would live and, to an extent, where I would work. What I experienced was the feeling of utter relief in being sent to Seoul combined with a terrible dread of what could have happened. This may be how people who walk away from plane crashes feel.